Engineering, Economics & Coffee

The War with China

Over at K State they are worried about whether or not education is emphasizing math and science. It’s the usual kind of stuff that I rail against, then there’s this paragraph:

The United States has in fact fallen far behind other nations when it comes to levels of innovation and young blood entering the technology industries. While India and China are graduating almost one million engineering students annually, the U.S. produces only 120,000 graduates.

Oh no! China’s graduating more engineers! What will we do with ourselves!

First of all, what China considers an engineer is not what the US, the UK or Canada consider an engineer. And secondly, pop on over to any major online career board site and you’ll see there are only about 50k “engineer” jobs open. And 20k (that’s 40% for you non-mathies) of those are software jobs. So let’s not panic please. If we are graduating 2.4 times as many engineers as we have jobs open, and when you consider that a “software engineer” does not always require an engineering degree, there’s no damn shortage.